Petiot, Marcel André Henri Félix

1897 - Born on January 17th in Auxerre, 100 miles south of Paris. French serial murder.

1902 - His early teachers found Petiot intelligent, reading like a 10-year-old by age five, but he was also a loner with a short attention span.

1908 - At age 11, he stole his father’s revolver and fired it in history class.

1914 - At age 17 he robbed a postbox, and was then charged with mail theft and damaging public property.

- A psychiatrist pronounced Petiot “an abnormal youth suffering from personal and hereditary problems which limit to a large degree his responsibility for his acts”. It was enough to get the charges dropped in August, Petiot’s judge declaring that “the accused appears to be mentally ill”.

1921 - Aided by an accelerated education program for war veterans, he had completed medical school in a stunning eight months and was serving a two-year psychiatric internship Evreux. He received his medical degree on December 15th, from the Faculté de Médeceine de Paris.

1927 - Petiot married Georgette Lablais, the 23-year-old daughter of a wealthy landowner in nearby Seignelay.

1942 - Petiot was convicted in both narcotics cases. He was fined F10,000 for each offense, but the fine was reduced on appeal to a total of F2,400.

1943 - Petiot had been arrested in May, along with three others, on suspicion of smuggling Jews out of occupied France.

1944 - Marcel Petiot was still a fugitive on June 6th, when Allied troops invaded France and the investigation ground to a halt.